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Well, at first I thought it's some early beta. And I wanted to say that it looks promising. But the game is coming out in spring 2017. So...

It's hard to judge upcoming Pray by some short presentation, but I am not impressed with this gameplay at all. It just looks very... raw and indistinctive. I guess it lacks some interesting visual style (a la Bioshock, Dishonored, or even Dead Space). And those menus, aliens and glue gun effects... they look like some (ugly) placeholders.

Looks good, hope its not too shoot-shooty tho and you can use other skills. The glue gun is neat (even tho it's basically a freeze ray). Wonder if you can glue furniture and corpses together... now I want to make a Katamari ;p

I love the turn-into-inanimate-objects mechanic. It's so weird and unexpected, and it might lead to some great emergent gameplay. Not crazy about the enemies being able to turn into objects tho. Seems like you'd constantly have to be on your guard. I think the mimic in Dark Souls works well because it's a predetermined object so whenever you see a chest you get a bit wary, but it's not like you're always edging around every piece of furniture you come across.

Originally Posted by Sulphur

I wonder if they'd be able to give Anachronox a fair shake.

Gameplaywise I have no doubt they'd be able to surpass the crappy JRPG system of the original, but as for writing the story and characters? I don't have a lot of faith in Arkane living up to the original on that side. Then again, I don't think Richard Gaubert is doing anything these days. Get him onboard and you got something!

I love the turn-into-inanimate-objects mechanic. It's so weird and unexpected, and it might lead to some great emergent gameplay. Not crazy about the enemies being able to turn into objects tho. Seems like you'd constantly have to be on your guard.

It's effectively Prop Hunt from GMod as a single player horror experience.

I love the turn-into-inanimate-objects mechanic. It's so weird and unexpected, and it might lead to some great emergent gameplay. Not crazy about the enemies being able to turn into objects tho. Seems like you'd constantly have to be on your guard. I think the mimic in Dark Souls works well because it's a predetermined object so whenever you see a chest you get a bit wary, but it's not like you're always edging around every piece of furniture you come across.

True. I can see it adding a bit of good psychological horror where you never know where they're coming from. But it cold get tedious too if overdone. We'll see!

It looks okish at best. The bounty hunter version seemed a lot more interesting and fresh than another space station BioShock-style System Shock wannabe, at least based off of the trailers. There's just nothing too amazing about it so far. It's Arkane though so here's hoping.

Interesting, not sure what to think yet. It seems to have a bizarrely cold vibe to it, possibly intentionally. Lots of cool mechanics in there - will be interesting to see if / how it all comes together.

Also, it doesn't look very next-gen at all, so fingers crossed that it's far better optimized than dishonored 2

Wow, it IS CryEngine! (confirmed by the official site) I'm really surprised. I thought it was their in-house Void Engine.

Seriously, why isn't it id Tech 6 then? It's not like the environments are vastly different from DOOM4 (space station, corridors, etc) and with that they'd have phenomenal graphics and superb performance. Instead the game looks really outdated and it even has the obnoxious pop-in of objects 10m away from you like Dishonored 2.

Been reading/watching some stuff from the Game Informer coverage and there are few bits of info that caught my attention.

First of all, they still say the game is one persistent world, one giant mission and that outside of the beginning you can go pretty much everywhere. Interestingly they say there is an area early on that you can go to but because the aliens there are very strong, you'll likely not survive... but you can still try. There is also an elevator that you have to fix and once you do, you can travel between the decks (yup). Surprisingly, there actually is weapon degradation in the game and your stuff will break if you can't maintain it. Finally, as if it didn't have Shock2 written all over it already, there are

spoiler:

possessed humans that are aware that they're being controlled so they warn you when you approach them. By the way, you can take them out nonlethally.

It sounds cool but only because it's familiar for obvious reasons. Gotta wait and see how it turns out.

Wow, it IS CryEngine! (confirmed by the official site) I'm really surprised. I thought it was their in-house Void Engine.

Seriously, why isn't it id Tech 6 then?

Better than shitty Void Engine, which is modded IdTech 5 aka a dumpster fire. I bet that trash still uses Radiant as the level editor. The CryEngine sandbox editing suite is from this century at least.

They released the mod tools for 2015's CoD: Black Ops 3 and even that's still using Radiant.

There are just a few survivors in the game and, interestingly, you can kill every single one of them (or they can be killed by aliens). Also, if they die before giving you a quest, you can still finish it because it exists in the gameworld anyway. Pretty cool.

That was Fallout 3, because the previous two games did allow you to do it (and penalised you harshly if you killed more than two, including one character who was technically a child but was more than a little evil.)

To be fair, it is a little silly for people to be immortal. I was more commenting on the amount of effort developers go to in order to make everyone killable (which could theoretically have been spent on other things.)
That said, the actual scenario they are trying to account for is usually "if this NPC dies or is killed for some reason, can the game still cope?" - being able to kill absolutely everyone is just a side effect of handling it for any and all individual cases.

Personally, I think having important NPCs be immortal is an acceptable break from reality, because them dying is usually more annoying than anything else. Now, instead of just having to reload if I die, I have to reload if an important NPC dies, or miss out on a part of the game? I don't really see the benefits of it.

Half-Life 1(!) had a trigger where if a necessary NPC died, the game just ended with something along the lines of "Misuse of Human Resources". I liked that approach. Yeah, you can do it - you just won't win if you do, and we're not going to hang around waiting for you to figure that out (nor are we going to go to ridiculous lengths to make the game still beatable after you eff the eff up). Makes sense to me.

Indeed it works in HL1, because its a corridor shooter. In a more open game like immersive sims, it takes away from how really simulated the world is.

Honestly, I care for it more because it reflects the devs philosophy on the title: do we want a specific linear experience vs. do we want to give player complete freedom. Different games benefit from different approaches, of course.

That being said, immortal NPCs don't usually bother me as long as it's not them getting themselves killed repeatedly and necessitating babysitting (ah escort missions...)